Creatures of Habit
by Jill McCorkle
Classy publisher of literary fiction and one of the ablest contemporary practitioners of the short story art combine to produce a superlative compendium of tales set in North Carolina. What makes Southern writers so good? These deceptively simple animal-titled tales resonate and entertain, with people in one story migrating without warning to another story, further illuminating character and motivation.

Divining Women
by Kaye Gibbons
In autumn, 1918, at the emotionally strangling confluence of a flu epidemic and rumors of imminent peace, Maureen Ross makes two important discoveries: She is married to an emotionally frozen tyrant, and she is pregnant with his child.

Good Priest's Son
by Reynolds Price
An art conservator returns to his childhood home after being caught in the turmoil of 9/11. This novel is, then, about reconnecting with the past when the future is obviously so uncertain.

Look Back All the Green Valley
by Fred Chappell
Cahppell narrates with his trademark voice, one both poetic and inclusive of the idioms of the Appalachian Mountain region. Fans of Chappell (Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You; Brighten the Corner Where You Are) will find this an intelligent and rewarding if sentimental closure to the Kirkman cycle.

Lunch at the Piccadilly: A Novel
by Clyde Edgerton
Respect for his elders, Southern charm, an ear for authentic dialogue, and a great sense of humor are Clyde Edgerton's trademarks. Lunch at the Piccadilly is no exception. Lil Olive, lively octogenarian, fetches up at the Rosehaven Convalescent Center after a bad fall, but she is not ready to pack it in. Instead, she befriends several of her peers, plans outings which she executes by stealing a car she insists is hers, and starts laying bets on whether or not Clara removes her glass eye at night. Fun, southern style.

Murder Boogies With Elvis
by Anne George
Y'all want lots of good laughs with a grisly murder and some clever detecting thrown in? Join the sexagenarian southern sisters, Mary Alice, a six-footer, and Patricia Anne, a size-six petite. In their eighth adventure from Agatha-winner George (Murder on a Girls' Night Out; Murder on a Bad Hair Day; etc.).

Nowhere Else on Earth
by Jill Humphreys
Although not a single cannon is fired in Josephine Humphreys's quietly ambitious Nowhere Else on Earth, the lives of the inhabitants of Scuffletown, a poor Indian settlement on the Lumbee River in North Carolina, are in every way affected by the Civil War. The demand for turpentine, their principal industry, has dwindled to nothing. When they are not fending off or involuntarily "supplying" Union soldiers and marauding gangs, they are hiding their sons from the macks, their hostile Confederate neighbors (pink-faced Scottish farmers with names like McTeer and McLean), who are rounding up Scuffletown boys for forced labor in forts and salt works, from which few return. A different Civil War story.

Pawley's Island
by Dorothea Benton Frank
The Lowcountry comes back to life when Becca Sims wanders into the beautiful seaside Gallery Valentine hoping to sell some of her watercolors. With vivid, unforgettable characters, dreamy Lowcountry setting and an authentically brazen, compulsively readable Southrthern voice Frank delivers a story of a life transformed.

Problem With Murmur Lee: A Novel
by Connie May Fowler
This elegiac novel, chronicling the life and death of idiosyncratic Murmur Lee Harp, showcases Fowler's easy, loose-limbed prose and sympathetic eye for human fallibility. Murmur Lee, 35, owns a popular local rundown bar in a North Florida backwater called Iris Haven and is skilled in the use of potions and spells. the story of this woman's life through the eyes of her motley bunch of friends and through the spirit of Murmur Lee as she looks back at her past life.

Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch
by Haywood Smith
Left in a situation right out of a bad country-and-western song (her husband has run off with a stripper), Linwood Breedlove Scott heads back her hometown of Mimosa Branch, GA, to create a new life. Lin finds her parents as crazy as they were when she married 30 years ago, and the small town outside of Atlanta is ripe with corruption.

Savannah Breeze
by Mary Kay Andrews
spirited sequel to 2001's Savannah Blues, Southern belle BeBe Loudermilk continues to attract the wrong kind of man. Thrice married and divorced, her latest romantic debacle involves Ryan Edward "Reddy" Millbanks, an unscrupulous financial consultant who takes her for everything she has. Left with her ramshackle inn on Tybee Island, this is light pastel fun.

Standing In the Rainbow
by Fannie Flagg
The war is over, the American economy is booming, and there is no better place in the world than Elmwood Springs, Missouri. At least that's what Bobby Smith thinks. He is the 10-year-old son of Neighbor Dorothy (Welcome to the World, Baby Girl). The joy and humor of small town America comes through.

Sweetwater Creek: A Novel
by Anne Rivers Siddons
The mystical landscape of oak groves and tidal rivers where dolphins play is home to 12-year-old Emily Parmenter, daughter of a struggling plantation owner whose only claim to success is his line of legendary Boykin hunting spaniels. Emily grieves the death of her cherished older brother while also coming to terms with her mother's desertion.

The Last Girl: A Novel
by Lee Smith
In the brisk and readable The Last Girls, reunites four college suitemates on a boat tour of the mighty Mississippi. Thirty-five years before, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn in class, the women floated down the same river on a manmade. The story unfolds through the eyes of each woman as the old friends weave college memories with their own dramas spanning the three decades since graduation.